Ida also pays a little attention to young men. They are all important members of the congregation sitting in a corner behind the living room, talking loudly. Most young people are disdainful of drinking champagne. They bring small bottles full of soju, and from time to time, they sneak around from their pockets to have a drink. They have courted Ida but hastily hit the wall. Hob Mars mythology’s voice is as loud as talking to people in the house. He says that he has been celebrating the savior’s birthday every night for a week. Those dances are really over before dawn. He is so good at lighting up all the way. When he finished speaking, he reached for someone else’s bottle, took a sip of the back of his hand and wiped his mouth. He looked at his hand and wiped it again. This wine is really spicy, he said with a bright voice and handed it back.
Women of all ages are sitting in the other corner. Sally Swanzhe is wearing a pair of beautiful new shoes. She is waiting for someone to evaluate her. Her feet are stretched out in front like a stuffed doll. Another older woman embellishes her story about her daughter’s sad marriage. Her husband insists that a litter of hounds also live in their room. These dogs wander around the kitchen every day, but they just don’t catch raccoons. She says that she is really scared to visit her daughter’s house. She also says that her daughter has been having children one after another for several years in the broth, and she is anxious to get married early. Now it is annoying to think about marriage.
Later, several groups of people mixed together, some sang around the piano and danced younger. Ada played the piano for a while, but she couldn’t concentrate on playing a few waltzes, so she put it aside. Rao watched with interest as Esco came to the stadium and whistled and accompanied him to perform a solo shuffle dance. When he danced, his eyes were glazed and his head kept shaking like a spring.
The party was still going on. Ida had drunk more than one glass than usual, and her face was sticky and cold. Her neck was wrapped in green velvet skirt and she kept sweating. She felt that her nose seemed to swell badly, so she pinched her thumb and forefinger to see if it was big. Then she went to the hall to look in the mirror, but she was surprised to find that her nose looked nothing unusual.
At this time, Sally Swanson also pulled Ada into the corridor thanks to Monroe champagne and whispered that the Inman guy had just arrived. I shouldn’t say anything, but you should marry him. You two are likely to have beautiful babies with brown eyes.
Ida was startled by this, and her face burned, and she quickly hid in the kitchen shyly.
Unexpectedly, I bumped into Inman sitting alone by the fire, which made her even more upset. Ma Yingman rode through the continuous winter rain, and it was already late. He wanted to warm up his clothes and dry them before going to meet everyone. He was wearing a black hat with his legs crossed and hung by the fire, and his boots, toes and palms stretched forward to meet the fire, which was like pushing something.
Oh, my God, Ida said you were here and knew you were here, but the ladies were so happy.
It’s the old ladies, isn’t it? Inman said
Oh, it’s a person. Your coming especially makes Mrs. Swanzer happy.
After saying this, Mrs. Swanzer just hinted that a picture flashed in Ada’s mind unexpectedly and clearly. She couldn’t help but feel flustered and blushed, adding that of course others did, too.
Are you a little dizzy? Inman asked Ada about her performance to help him understand.
No, it’s not. This room is too stuffy.
Your face is a little red
Ida reversed her hand and touched the back of her finger around her sweaty face. Then she took her finger as a caliper to measure the thickness of her nose. For a moment, she couldn’t find words. She went to the door and knocked on the door, breathing the cool air outside. At night, it smelled of damp rotten leaves. It was very dark. Rain fell from the porch eaves and reflected the light of the door. From the living room, King Wei hillas made a simple prelude. From the blunt piano, Ida heard Monroe playing. At this moment, a lonely and sharp gray wolf came from the darkness and howled in the distant mountains.
Sounds like a stray, Inman said
Ida kept the door waiting to hear whether to call, but there was silence all the time. Poor thing, she said
She turned to face Inman, but the room temperature, champagne and Inman’s face were softer than anything she had ever seen here. Her expression seemed to conspire to calculate her. Ada felt dizzy. She staggered a few steps. Inman stood up and held out a hand to help her, but she didn’t refuse. Then she found herself sitting on Inman’s leg. How did all this happen? But she couldn’t remember it anymore.
Inman put his hand on Ada’s shoulder, and Ada leaned against his head in his arms. Ada remembered that she thought it would be nice to sit like this forever, but she didn’t know what to say to herself. But she did remember Inman seemed as satisfied as she was and didn’t ask for more. She just moved her hands slightly outward to hold her shoulders and let her lean firmly against her chest. She still remembered that he was wet, and the smell of wool sweater still lingered on the saddle.
She may have sat on his leg for half a minute at most, and then she got up and left. Ida remembered stopping at the door, holding the doorframe and looking back at Inman. He was still sitting with a puzzled smile on his face and his hat fell to the ground in turn.
Ada played the door from the piano for a long time. After a while, Inman finally came in. He leaned against the doorframe and drank champagne with a tall glass in his hand. He looked at Ada for a while and then went over to talk to Esco. The old man was still sitting in front of the fireplace. No one was in the kitchen that night until the end. Occasionally, Inman talked briefly and was not there. He left before the end of the party.
After a long time, the party ended in the middle of the night, and people dispersed. Ida watched the boys leave them along the road at the living room window, raised their pistols, flashed into the air, and the flames instantly lit up their figures, then disappeared into the darkness.
The carriage turned the corner with the piano, and Ida sat for a while, then lit a lantern and went to the basement, thinking that Monroe might have returned a box or two of champagne. It would be nice if she could occasionally make a bottle. She didn’t find the wine, but she accidentally found a big bag collapsed in the corner of the real baby, in which Monroe hid 100 pounds of green coffee beans, which would greatly promote their barter.
Ida called Ruby, and they did not hesitate to take half a pound of coffee beans and fry them in a baking oven and grind them into powder, and then brewed them. Both of them drank real coffee for the first time in a year. They drank one cup after another for one night, and they stayed up all night talking about their future plans and memories. Ida also told the touching story of Du Park Jung Su from the beginning to the end. This is what she read many times in the summer. In the next few days, they took half a pound of coffee or small cups at a time, and the neighbors easily left ten pounds in the bag. They have already changed back to a pickled pig. Five bushels of meat, four bushels of potatoes, four bushels of sweet potatoes, a can of fermented chicken, all kinds of baskets full of pumpkin beans, okra, a loom that needs a little repair, and six bushels of corn grains are enough to repave the roof board of the fumigation room, but the most valuable one is a bag of five pounds of heavy salt, which is very rare and expensive now. People dig up the soil in the fumigation room and boil it in water, then filter it again and again until the soil is filtered and the water is boiled dry. Finally, they get back the salt they went to the ground when they made cured pork last year.
Ruby showed great energy in doing other things. She soon forced Ida to change the law of self-interest. Before dawn, Ruby would feed the horses from the shack hill and milk the cows. After that, the pots and pans in the kitchen jingled. Soon the stove was burning hot. Corn porridge was bubbling in the pot. Eggs, bacon and oil were not used to getting up at dawn. In fact, she rarely got up before ten o’clock last summer, but suddenly she didn’t choose to stay in bed. Ruby would break in and blow her into the house. Ruby thought she was working. It’s to put farm life on the right track instead of waiting on a certain owner to order them around. Occasionally, Ida didn’t pay attention to the servant’s attitude and told Ruby to do things. Ruby gave her a hard look and then continued to do what she was doing. The look in her eyes showed that Ruby could just leave and disappear from here at any time like a sunny morning mist.
One of Ruby’s exquisite things is that although she didn’t expect Ida to cook breakfast, she did hope that Ida could watch when breakfast was finished. Ida would walk into the kitchen in her nightgown and sit in a warm chair next to the stove with a cup of coffee in her hands. It would be sunny and the weather outside the window would be gray eventually, and Ida rarely could see the garden fence outside the kitchen through the fog. After a while, Ruby blew out the dim light, and then the sky outside the window gradually lit up and spread all over the room. This process always made Ida feel very magical. She hadn’t witnessed many times.
When cooking and eating, Ruby kept talking for a moment. The coming day made all kinds of unambiguous hard plans, but Ada felt that the sky outside the window was so soft and hazy that it was so uncoordinated. When summer was coming to an end, Ruby seemed to have a strong sense of urgency about the arrival of winter, like a hibernating bear who was madly foraging for fat in autumn. At this time, she said that everything was about how to make the best efforts to lay a good foundation and create conditions for a smooth winter. To Ada, Ruby’s words seemed to be mainly composed of verbs-not to make people feel tired.
Listen to Ida, they can relax in winter. Ruby said, Oh, when winter comes, we have to start repairing the broken joints of the grating. There are a lot of things to be repaired.
Ida never thought that life alone would be so hard. After breakfast, they kept working. Even if there was no heavy work, there were always many chores to keep them busy. When Monroe was alive, life was nothing more than going to the bank to withdraw money. It was abstract and far away. Now Ruby’s life together is unpleasant. The details are naked in front of her eyes. Everyone needs to work hard at hand.
Of course, in her previous life, Ida paid attention to the table food, but paid little attention to how they came to the table. Because Monroe always paid someone to plant a vegetable garden, Ruby broke her anger. Every day for the first month, Ruby seemed to drive Ida to face the vulgarity and hardship of eating life. She clung to this point and forced Ida to realize that Ida didn’t want to work. Ruby forced her to do it and let her wear coarse clothes and dig vegetables in the soil until her nails became rough and dirty. In Ada’s view, Ruby even let her go. She climbed to the smokehouse, covered with shingles, and the roof was high and steep. The cold mountain and the tapered green peaks seemed to be spinning. Ruby regarded Ida’s successful butter stirring as her first victory. Her second victory was to find that Ida no longer always put one in her pocket when she went to hoe.
Ruby resolutely refused to do all the disgusting work by herself. She asked Ada to put the struggling hen on the chopping block and cut off its head with an axe. When the bloody chicken stumbled around the yard with the old trick of drunkards, Ruby pointed to it and said, This is your food.
Adaken listened to Ruby’s urging because she knew vaguely in her heart that everyone else she could hire would be tired of letting her down one day and Ruby would never leave her.
After dinner, when the dishes are all washed and put away, they will have a short rest. At this time, Ida will sit on the porch and read the story until it is dark. For Ruby, Ida thinks it is best to read Homer to her from the beginning. Usually, they read 15 to 15 pages late every day, and then when the light becomes too dark, Ida will tease Ruby and tell her the story. After a few weeks, she finally pieced together the outline of Ruby’s experience.
According to Ruby, she is really poor. Every time she cooks, the oil is almost the same as rubbing the skin on the bottom of the frying pan. She has never met her mother and father, whose name is Stebrod Sivus. They live in a shack with no floor, which is not much better than a pigsty with a roof. The shack is small, but it seems to be the only temporary place to deal with it. The difference between the gypsy caravan is that it has no wheel floor. Ruby says that the bed is just a wooden frame, and her old mattress is filled with dried moss. Without the ceiling, the top of the head directly faces the roof with layers of shingles. Ruby woke up many times in the morning and found that an inch of snow had been accumulated, which was blown in by the wind through the cracks in the shingles like sifted flour. In this morning, Ruby found that the cabin had another advantage, and it could be warmed up quickly by burning a few twigs. However, it was not good for Stebrod to build a chimney, and the suction was too weak to smoke ham in the house. Unless the weather was extremely bad, Ruby preferred to cook in a gazebo at the back of the house.
However, although the hut was small and simple, Stebrod was too lazy to repair it. Without a daughter, he might have lived happily in a tree hole long ago, because according to Ruby’s evaluation, a memory animal was the highest praise he could have given himself.
Once she is old enough to take care of herself, Ruby has to find her own food. In Stebrod’s idea, walking is equivalent to taking care of herself or being a child. Ruby is foraging around in the Woods and begging for food from a kind-hearted family along the river. Ruby’s best childhood memory is that she once walked along the river path to Alice Vanzhe’s house to ask for some white bean soup to drink on her way home. Ruby has been wearing it for several years, even when she was caught by a black thorn plum on the side of the road during the day, she couldn’t get rid of it. There was no one on the afternoon road, and the sky was getting darker and darker like a lamp that was about to go out. Night fell, and it was dark around the crescent moon hook in May. Four-year-old Ruby was hooked by the black thorn plum and spent the night in the wild.
That darkness was an inspiration to Ruby, and it stayed in her heart forever. The fog floating on the river bank was very cold. She remembered shivering and crying for help for a while. She was worried that she would be eaten by a leopard sneaking from the cold mountain. It was said by Stebrod’s drinkers that the leopard would take a child away in a blink of an eye. They also said that the mountains were full of hungry beasts, and they all ate children’s meat and foraged for bears. There were also many evil spirits in the mountains. They would have various images, and now each one was terrible. They would take you away. God knows what they would do to you.
She also heard the old Cherokee ladies talk about cannibalism ghosts. They live in the river and eat human flesh. They secretly take people into the water at dawn. Child meat is their favorite food. Every time they take a person away, they leave him with an identical shadow. They can still talk, but there is no real life. It will shrink and die after 7 days.
The night aroused fear, so little Ruby sat for a while shivering with cold and sobbing. At last, those cannibals seemed to come to prey on the child, and Ruby was almost breathless with fear.
But then she heard a voice speaking to her in the dark, which seemed to rattle the river, but it wasn’t a man-eating devil. It seemed to be some kind of gentle power or an animal spirit, a patron saint who put her on her wings and cared for her well-being from that moment on. She remembered walking through every star in the gap between the branches of her head that night and saying every word directly to her heart. It comforted her, cared for her and protected her through the night. Although she wore a thin nightgown, she stopped shaking and sobbing.
The next morning, a fisherman helped her get rid of the thorns. When she got home, she didn’t say a word to Stebrod, and he didn’t ask her where she had gone, but the sound still echoed in her mind. Since then, she can know things that others will never know like a person with a fetal membrane on her face.
When Ruby grows up, some father and daughter depend on her to grow things in their small plot. Fortunately, the plot is not steep enough for farming. Huste Broder spends his time elsewhere and often disappears for many days. He will walk four miles to attend a dance, and when he hears a little dance wind in his front foot, he will leave with his sogeum. Although he can barely play a few tunes, Ruby may not see him for several days. Without this entertainment, Stebrod will go hunting in the Woods, but he himself said that he would go hunting. He occasionally shoots a squirrel or a groundhog and takes it home to stew and eat Stebrod’s ambition. When he can’t hit rodents, they eat chestnut, rhubarb, pokeweed and other rubies can be harvested in the wild, so Kiko can say that their diet is mainly to feed pigs and mistletoe.
Even Stebrod’s love for alcohol failed him to become a farmer. Instead of planting corn himself, he chose to steal the stolen corn with a sack in the dark and windy night when the corn was ripe. His buddies said that its intensity was unparalleled.
Others know that the only short employment experience ended in a disaster. A man who lived in a river tour hired him to help clear a new land for spring ploughing and planted trees. The man’s purpose was to ask Stebrod to help him burn these trees. They lit a big fire, cut off the branches of the trunk and rolled them into the fire. At this time, Stebrod suddenly realized that the work was much more tiring than he wanted. He put his shirt sleeves down and lifted his feet, and left. The other man had continued to work hard and dragged the trunk with a wooden hook. When he was dragged into the fire, he had to be very close to it. At this moment, several pieces of fire wood slipped and pressed his leg firmly. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t escape. He screamed for help, and the fire kept burning. Finally, he didn’t want to be burned, so he picked up a branch axe and cut off his leg knee-high. Then he tore a cloth from his trouser leg and tied it around his leg with a wooden stick to stop the bleeding. Then he made a branch and walked home on crutches. But that’s all.
After several years, Stebrod walked by the door in fear, because he was indignant that the guy with the prosthetic leg had a grudge and might shoot him from the porch at any time.
Ruby was curious about what kind of woman her mother would be before she would marry a man like Stebrod, but by this time her mother seemed to have been completely erased from his memory. When Ruby asked, Stebrod said that she didn’t remember anything, and I couldn’t remember whether she was fat or thin, he said.
蒲友网